The Desert

by Pierre Loti (1850-1923)

Pierre Loti is the pseudonym under which the French Decadent
novelist - and naval officer, artist, and acrobat - Julien Viaud
wrote. Le Désert, first published in Paris in 1895, is not a
novel but a poetic account of the author's journey by camel
caravan from Suez to Gaza by way of Sinai in 1894. As Peter Wild
observes of Loti in his introductory essay in this issue, "his
writing shows a gross misunderstanding of the Arab cultures he
encountered, but . . . The Desert, for all the blithe liberties
it takes with the facts, is an accomplished effervescence." Our
excerpt is drawn from Jay Paul Minn's translation, published in
1993 by The University of Utah Press. We pick up Loti's narrative
on the fourth day of what he acknowledged in his preface to be
&nothing but the fantasy of a slow journey, at the pace of
swaying camels in the infinite of the pink desert."

Five: Monday, February 26

Every morning you wake up in a different setting of the vast
desert. You leave your tent and are surrounded by the splendor of
the virginal morning. You stretch your arms and half-naked body
in the cold pure air. Out on the sand, you wrap your turban and
drape yourself in your white woolen veils. You get drunk on light
and space. At the time of waking, you know the heady intoxication
of just being able to breathe, just being alive . . .

And then off you go, perched atop the ever-moving camel that
steadily plods along until nighttime. You go along, go along, go
along, and you see in front of you a hairy head decorated with
shells and its long neck, cutting the air like the prow of a ship
at sea. Wasteland follows wasteland. You stretch your ears into
the silence and you hear nothing, not a birdsong, nor the buzz of
a fly, because there is nothing alive anywhere . . .

After a chilly dawn, the sun suddenly climbs and warms. The
four hours of our morning travel as we go east into the sun are
the most dazzling time of the day. Then we have our noon stop at
a randomly chosen spot, in a flimsy tent that was set up quickly.
The slower caravan of our Bedouin and baggage camels catches up,
goes by with shouts as if at a wild party, and disappears into
the unknown ahead. Then, after the four hours of our afternoon
trek, we finally arrive at our new place for the night, and we
have the simple physical joy of finding our tents again, where
our gentle dromedaries kneel to set us down.

This morning we start off into hot valleys between
claustrophobic mountains. The sun is dreary, dreary; it is like a
big dying ember that could fall from the sky. Your tired eyes
follow the shadows of the camels as they move along the
reflecting sand. And as always happens when you approach distant
mountains, the mountains seem black in contrast with the sheen of
the sand nearby.

Toward afternoon we are very high up in the remote wastes of
the Sinai peninsula. New spaces unfold on all sides; this
tangible sign of their immensity increases our understanding of
what wilderness is, but it also intimidates us more.

And it is an almost terrifying magnificence . . . In a
distance that is much clearer than usual earthly distances,
mountain chains join and overlap. They are in regular
arrangements that man has not interfered with since the creation
of the world. And they have harsh brittle edges, never softened
by the least vegetation. The closest row of mountains is a
reddish brown; then, as they stand closer to the horizon, the
mountains go through elegant violet, turning a deeper and deeper
blue, until they are pure indigo in the farthest chain. And
everything is empty, silent, and dead. Here you have the splendor
of fixed perspectives, without the ephemeral attraction of
forests, greeneries, and grasslands; it is also the splendor of
almost eternal stuff, freed of life's instabilities. The
geological splendor from before the Creation . . .

From another height at evening, we discover a plain with no
visible limits, composed of sand and stone, speckled with spindly
reddish bushes. The plain is flooded with light, burning with the
sun's rays, and our camp, already set up out there with its
infinitely tiny white tents, becomes a pygmy village dwarfed by
this magnificent wilderness.

Oh! The sunset this time! Never had we seen so much gold
spread out around our lonely camp for us alone. And as our camels
are doing their usual evening foraging, they loom strangely large
against the empty horizon and have gold on their heads, on their
legs, and on their long necks. They are completely edged with
gold. The plain is all gold. And the bushes are gold . . .Then
comes the night, the clear silent night . . .

And now you feel an almost religious fear if you wander away
and lose sight of the camp. But in order to be absolutely alone
in the black emptiness, you separate yourself from your little
handfull of living things lost in this dead land. The stars shine
in the cosmic void but are closer and more accessible than
before. In this desert the stars are permanent and ageless;
looking at them here, one feels closer to understanding their
inconceivable infinity; one almost has the illusion of truly
being united with universal permanence and time . . .

Six: Tuesday, February 27

For they were departed from Rephidim, and were come to the
desert of Sinai, and had pitched in the wilderness. (Exodus xix:2)

Five days now without finding water. But we still have
enough from the Nile.

Traveled all morning in yesterday's plain, where the broom
has been replaced with sparser clumps of plants, whitish green,
half-buried in sand, balls of thorns that could pierce feet like
iron spikes.

We are beginning to come upon big black stones standing
upright on the sand, set up like men or menhirs. At first rather
sparse, they become more and more numerous_and also taller and
taller. Then little by little, as we go on gently swaying, they
take on the dimensions of dungeons, towers, and fortresses;
finally they group, forming corridors, like the streets of some
destroyed cyclopean city - and they enclose us with dark walls.

The noon stop is in one of these forbidding valleys . . .

While we are sleeping on our carpets, raucous loud voices
suddenly resound from the reflecting stones. Our guards, our
drivers, and our camels are letting us know they are going by.
It's the slower caravan that follows us every morning and gets
ahead of us during our noon rest, so that it can beat us to the
evening stop. Both animals and men usually greet us with shrieks
as they go by, and today their voices are more piercing, due to
surprisingly loud echoes from these dry rocks that resonate like
dead wood.

We proceed until the hour of evening prayer through narrow
winding valleys. But their walls are constantly changing shape
and color. They become pink granite, veined with broad bands of
blue or green rock.

This region is less desolate than before, because here we
have trees, the first we have seen in five days. Oh, wretched
little trees, a kind of thorny mimosa like those you find in the
Sahara, in Senegal, and Obock; during this early spring they have
just turned light green, with barely visible pale leaves. And
strewn about occasionally among chunks of granite, there are
delicate little white flowers.

At a fork in these valleys, we came upon two adorable
Bedouin youngsters, brother and sister, who watched us
approaching with fright in their dark velvet eyes. They tell us
there are campsites up in the mountain. Indeed we hear distant
guard dogs barking to announce our presence. Soon afterwards we
see herds of goats shepherded by Bedouin dressed and veiled in
black.

Our old driver-sheik then comes and requests my permission
to leave us until tomorrow, so that he can visit this tribe,
where he has sons.

We come close to the "Myrrh Mountain" and suddenly the whole
desert has a delightful scent, because skinny little plants
release delicious, strange odors as they are crushed by the
hooves of our camels.

The ground of these interminable mountain passes is slowly
climbing toward the central plateau in almost unnoticeable
degrees. We will continue to go up for two more days, slowly
heading for the Sinai Convent at a height of two thousand meters.

We are still in rough terrain. Very recently mountains must
have crumbled, breaking up on the sand with apocalyptic noise,
for gigantic ruins with fresh fractures give evidence of past
catastrophes. And we continue our ascent on crumbled blue and
pink granite, between stands of the same rock that are cracked at
the bottom, seemingly on the verge of tumbling down.

For the night we camp in a high valley beside stark and
frightening embankments of red granite, where the air is turning
cold as ice.

Seven: Wednesday, February 28

And it came to pass on the third day in the morning, that
there were thunders and lightnings, and a thick cloud upon
the mount, and the voice of the trumpet exceeding loud; so
that all the people that was in the camp trembled. (Exodus xix:16)

In the middle of the night, we are awakened by the racket of
thunder made outsize and terrible here in this resonant echoing
valley. A violent wind shakes our fragile canvas houses and
threatens to blow us away. And our camels moan in the sudden and
torrential downpour. . .

Wind more than rain is the enemy of the nomads. You have to
get up and drive the stakes deeper, while the tents swell up, rip
loose, and tear_and then you wait, trying to face up to losing
your shelter in the frigid deluge: this is the impotent stress of
the infinitely small faced with massive sovereign forces . . .

As the forbidding valley explodes outside with almost
continual light, there is a terror of apocalypse. The valley
seems shaken to its core, giving off muffled and crackling noise.
You could say it is shuddering, opening up, caving in . . .

And then the bolts are slower and farther away. It all
becomes something deep and cavernous, as if one could hear worlds
turn in far-off voids . . .

And at last all is peaceful and calm . . .

Little by little we regain our silence, safety, and sleep.

In the cool, quiet morning at sunrise, when I open my tent,
the outside air carries a whiff of perfume, so that it seems as
if someone has broken a vial of aromatics in front of my door.
And all this forlorn valley of granite is also perfumed, as if it
were an oriental temple. Its few little pale plants, held back by
drought, have awakened because of the night's deluge and waft
their odors like countless incense burners. You could say that
the air is ripe with benjamin, citronella, geranium, and myrrh. . .

Right off I look at the deserted valley, so strange and
superb under the morning sun that is striking the red peaks into
flame, against a backdrop of black, tattered clouds, fleeing fast
to the north. The storm is still up there, while down here the
air is slack and still.

Then I look at the ground, the source of all these perfumes;
it is covered with white spots, like hailstorms after a storm . . .

Eight

And when the dew that lay was gone up, behold, upon the face
of the wilderness there lay a small round thing, as small as
the hoar frost on the ground. (Exodus xix:14)

What was shredded and left by wind and rain around our tents
last night appears to be manna . . . I pick up some of these
"small round things," these very hard white seeds, smelling
something like cheese - they are the dried fruit of the thorny
little plants that carpet these mountains here and there.

By collecting this manna, I have stirred up the perfumes of
the soil, and for some time my hands give off an exquisite
scent.